The beer started showing signs of fermentation in 12 hours or so with fairly rapid bubbles through the airlock. About a week and a half in, the airlock had slowed to a crawl and I finally found some new vinyl tubing (my old tube was too dirty to clean) to transfer my beer to my brand new (read: found on the street) secondary fermenter.

While transferring, I found a large portion of the yeast had floated to the top of the primary and smelled awful, but the beer below, flowing into the secondary, smelled amazing, like a mountain of oranges with sugar on top. I did my best to leave the floating yeast cake in the primary.

As I was advised in the brew shop, I topped off my secondary fermenter; it took almost 2 pints of water to limit the exposed surface area. Which it appears may not have been necessary. The transfer to the secondary reawakened enough yeast to overflow my airlock and now, after almost a week in the secondary, the airlock is going every three seconds like clockwork.

As I found the incredible reawakening of my yeast a bit odd I looked it up. Apparently WLP400 (the yeast I used) takes about 3 weeks to reach terminal gravity and many people recommended stirring it regularly which would explain the resurgence after the transfer.

So while transferring from the primary to the bottling bucket I forgot to close the spout on the bottling bucket so I lost almost a gallon of beer to the floor. Not fun but not the end of the world. Cleaned up pretty easy with a big towel… that I put in the laundry and forgot about, encouraging the growth of lots and lots of mold. It washed out so it’s all ok but Jackie will make fun of me for the rest of time.

After the spill it all went into bottles without incident and was given this label: